How to Write Flawed Characters

Nobody's perfect. We all have flaws, and those flaws can take a thousand different forms. In many ways it's our flaws that make us who we are, providing the shading and contrast that throws our positive qualities into a starker relief. Flaws give people depth and character, which is why if you want the populace of your stories to stand out they need to have flaws as well.

The problem for many authors comes in deciding just how to execute those flaws; specifically in how to take the characters you've created and to give them flaws that are real and meaningful, instead of purely cosmetic. Since this is not an easy process The Literary Mercenary has put together a simple guide that will help you distress your characters in ways that make them more believable.

Step #1: Give Your Characters Flaws That Make Sense

Let's start with an example; we'll call him Chris. Chris is a big, handsome young man who comes from a supporting home, and who has a long record of personal achievement. He makes good grades, achieves positions of leadership in sports, always has a smile for his classmates, and refuses to sit by while anyone gets bullied. So what's his damage? Well... he has a crippling lack of self confidence.

Okay... why?

It eventually got bad enough that he had to have a horse carry him everywhere.

Barring some secret past being revealed, the elements for this flaw aren't present. A young man who has done nothing but succeeded in his endeavors, and who is supported and valued should have, if anything, an over-inflated sense of confidence. After all, he's led the team to three championships while maintaining his place on the honor roll... what could possibly get in his way?

If you really wanted this flaw though, you could plant it in fertile soil by altering the character's background. For instance, say that Chris's mother and father divorced when he was 10 or so, but for those first 10 years nothing Chris did was ever really good enough for his dad. Good grades were ridiculed, praise from coaches sneered at, and Chris was constantly told how weak and stupid he was. Even if his mother re-married, and Chris's step dad was supportive and proud of his new son's achievements there are going to be scars from that earlier period. While he has the skills and the drive, Chris might be pushing himself to try and prove that his dad was wrong even while he's secretly afraid he might be right.

Put another way it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for your character to be deathly afraid of dogs if he's never seen one before. If you want to sell a flaw you have to make it make sense.

Note: A huge list of character flaws can be found right here on TV Tropes.

Step #2: Give Them Flaws That Will Matter

Detective Lieutenant Larry Stone is a hard-nosed homicide cop who takes no shit and gets the job done. He's tough as nails, can quote every subsection of the city's law book, and he has an unimpeachable record as a lawman.

But he's sexually impotent.

And he's really pissed about it.

If you're wondering how Larry being unable to have sex affects his ability to catch murderers then you're already on the right track. While not every flaw a character has will be center stage all the time, for those flaws to matter they actually have to get in the way of something the character is trying to accomplish. Otherwise it fades into the background, an unimportant footnote we can easily forget about because it isn't germane to the story we're telling.

I'll give you a good example.

There's a novel I'd love to write based off of White Wolf's (or Onyx Path as I believe they're known now) tabletop roleplaying game Promethean. In this game you play an artificially created being who must struggle to find humanity. There are several varieties, but one is the Wretched, known more colloquially as the Frankensteins. Enter Adolph Simmons, a 7'6" monster assembled from the best and the brightest of Ryker's Island, and brought to life in the electric chair by his maker. Escaping after his birth the giant swum to shore and faded into the alleys of Hell's Kitchen. Years go by and there are rumors of a creature called The Butcher of Hell's Kitchen, a favorite in the tabloids for his supposedly gruesome murders of criminals in the area surrounding Our Lady of Sorrows.

It's all rumors and smoke, until children start going missing from the orphanage run by said church. The self-proclaimed guardian of those unwanted youths, Simms has to find where they've gone and who's taking them. The problem is that while he possesses unparalleled supernatural strength, he isn't very smart. He has no training as an investigator, and this makes his efforts clumsy at best, brutal at worst.

This fiercely loyal monster could solve any problem with his hands if it came to a fight, but when he has to use his brain his biggest strength has been stripped away and he has to overcome one of his weaknesses. That's how character flaws add to your story.

Step #3: Flaws Are Not Strengths. They're Flaws

At this point in the list I don't have the energy to pull out rare examples or hidden gems from master authors. Instead I'm just going to go for the low-hanging fruit and use one of the many things wrong with Twilight to make this point.

This was a dead horse a while back... I guess there's one or two whacks left...

Let me draw your attention to the collection of character flaws that is the book's main object (being a protagonist would imply she took effort to achieve something). Among her many other flaws Bella Swan suffers from extreme co-dependency, being left dejected and unable to think or act for months when her abusive significant other abandons her. Rather than struggling to remember how to be independent (as one assumes she was before she was part of a couple) her complete inability to function outside of a relationship (no matter how unhealthy it was) is shown in a positive, romantic light. As if by refusing to put her life together, and actively setting the remnants of it on fire, is supposed to be a statement of great love.

Here's another example for you: Batman.

I've written about Batman's character mistakes before (the article is here, by the by), but he's the easiest example of the emotionally damaged archetype to hold up. A normal person who lost his parents in a mugging would grieve for them, and he would grow up with a sense of just how easily life can end. He would see how prevalent crime can be, and he might even be motivated to try and fight against it in his parents' memory. Perhaps he'd become a cop, or campaign for change to clean up the streets. Perhaps he'd look for ways to help those who have to deal with grief. The idea of dedicating one's life to more than a decade of training, and then several more decades of donning body armor and prowling the streets, breaking bones and smashing teeth is the act of a crazy person. When real people have done this (check out The Real Superhero Project for some real-world vigilantes who started their careers in a dark place) it's been met with abject horror. Yet when we take utter insanity and dress it up in a set of fictional tights we see Batman's dedication and drive as assets rather than a fanatical devotion spurred by someone unable to cope with a traumatic event.

Step #4: Scale Is Everything

So you've got your character, flaws and all. You've figured out what events left scars, and how he or she healed from them to become the person they are today. Before you decide you're done though you need to stop and take a look at the scale of the flaw, and compare it to the scale of the results.

And then the lemur burned down the zoo. Because reasons.

Creating flaws whose results are extreme happens all the time with villains (and I covered some of it in Under The Black Hat: Writing Believable Bad Guys). I personally call this Dr. Doom syndrome. For those of you who don't read comics Victor Von Doom is the sovereign ruler of a small kingdom called Latveria in Marvel Comics. As a young prince Doom traveled to America for his education (where we presume he earned a doctorate). While he was in the lab working on what we can only assume was his thesis there was an accident. The accident marred Victor's face, and he sought some way to repair the damage. After medicine and magic failed him he forged an iron mask, and encased himself in a suit of highly advanced armor which he is rarely seen without.

The reason I use this example is that in some versions of the origin Doom's face is marred, but it's far from a horror. A small scar was all it took to send him on a world-wide quest to restore what he viewed as perfection, and in the end he encased himself in a suit of armor that put Tony Stark's most cutting-edge Mark line to shame.

Yes the comic was trying to evoke both The Phantom of The Opera and The Man in The Iron Mask for the purpose of mystery. We never see Doom's face, so we don't know if it's a terrifying ruin, or if it just has a slight imperfection along the cheek. The point is that even if he was disfigured why the armor? Why an iron mask? Why seclude himself completely except for when he pursues his own ends? The story reads more like a myth than a character study, and as a result the actions are grand, sweeping, and ultimately kind of shallow.

Ask Yourself If Real People Are Broken Like This

Art imitates life, and vice versa. Even if you're putting your characters into a completely unreal scenario (farmer abducted by aliens becomes intergalactic gladiator), the ways in which the human psyche breaks and heals are fairly finite. Coping mechanisms are kind of universal, and someone dealing with the stress of completely Earth-bound wars may develop the same sorts of tics and triggers as those who've fought in alien gore pits. All you need is to find a situation similar to the one you're setting up, and ask how real people turn out in that sort of situation. If you can follow that blueprint then the flaws your characters develop are going to feel as real and organic as any person your readers have ever met.

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Being Realistic: How to Avoid Straining Your Readers' Suspension of Disbelief

You know when you're sitting on the couch on a Saturday, and an action flick you really like comes on? It's a lazy day, so you sit there and you watch for a while. You're really enjoying it, and then right when you're about to be fully submerged in the movie the lead spouts some childish nonsense that the censors put in to replace his much more profane catch phrase. That feeling of snapping back to reality and losing interest in what you're looking at is the sensation of your suspension of disbelief snapping.

One of those bad boys goes, they all go.

Whether or not your characters choose to say "fuck" (a topic I've already covered in this blog post) is not the issue; the issue is whether or not the scenario you're painting for your readers is believable. Regardless of how spectacular, or how abnormal the world you're painting is, if the reality you create is detailed enough to pass inspection then readers will accept your more bizarre elements.

But My Story Has Dragons and Sorcery! People Don't Read That For Realism!

Yes they do. This is a common complaint from a lot of writers who think that because their books focus on an extreme form of escapism that they don't have to do the hard work of realistic storytelling. Quite the opposite; writers in more extreme worlds have to be even more realistic in order to get us to swallow the rest of the package without question.

Nope... no questions here.

Here's what I mean by that. Say your story has really big, really hard to swallow elements in it; medieval fantasy in a non-existent world (A Song of Ice and Fire), a globe-spanning tale where a normal man in the modern day gets caught up in the affairs of gods (American Gods), or maybe a pandemic of the living dead practically destroyed civilization as we know it, and later generations have had to adapt (The Newsflesh Trilogy). Now, the more unrealistic the elephant in your living room is, the more in-depth you need to go so that people don't notice it.

The Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, the setting for a great deal of A Song of Ice and Fire are completely made up. But because George R. R. Martin spins an intricate web of history, and because he built these kingdoms with everything from the symbols on their flags to the countryside they inhabit, they feel like they could be real places.  Because all that work has gone into breathing soul into the setting, no one questions it when dragons are reborn into the world. The same logic applies to Neil Gaiman's American Gods; because such detail is paid to the world these beings inhabit the gods feel like an organic part of that world. As such their presence is accepted by the reader without much question. In The Newsflesh Trilogy by Mira Grant the steps taken to render a world that's survived and altered to grow past zombies becoming a normal thing is occasionally staggering. An entire generation who carries guns everywhere they go, who avoids big meeting places, and who doesn't think twice about taking a dozen or more blood tests every day takes such exhaustive work to detail that when political conspiracy is introduced the reader doesn't even think to question it.

That's what I mean by realism. It doesn't mean you can't have impossible things; it means that those impossible things need to be diced up in such a way that the reader never, ever stops and questions what he or she is being told.

But Stories Are About People!

Right you are again bold, italic text. The world a story is set in, its history and mechanics, are set dressing; if you do it right, the audience will never notice it's there. People are here to see the actors, in this case your characters, solving whatever puzzling plot you've put forth. If characters are flat, boring, or unrealistic though, then readers are going to shut the book and lose interest.

I touched on this a little bit in this blog post here, but realism as it affects a cast is a touchy balancing act at the best of times. Authors need to know who their characters are, what their life experiences have been, and they need to be able to convince the reader through tricky legerdemain that these characters could be real people even though they obviously aren't real. Many times they aren't even people.

So what you're saying is...

As always, examples work best. So let's take a look at the Frankenstein monster. During the monster's pow-wow with its creator in the frozen wastes of the mountains we get its entire life story. We get to see how it goes from being a child in the body of a giant to a thinking, intelligent creature capable of speech, thought, reading and writing. We, as the audience, see how the monster has become who and what it is in a fairly short time frame, and that exposition dump turns the monster from some murderous, savage creature into a being that is trying to make some sense of its life, its feelings, and its power. Nothing we see the monster do ever seems unrealistic because we know him; we know what he wants, how he feels, and how he thinks. He is, for all intents and purposes, real to us. Most importantly his actions are in character.

All characters have histories, and those histories made them who they are. By showing these histories in big and little ways characters' actions become understandable. A schoolteacher who is needlessly harsh on one particular student might seem like a stock bad guy, but if you reveal that the student's parents were rivals or even enemies of the teacher in question then it becomes clear that he simply hasn't been able to put those demons to rest and is extracting a kind of vicarious revenge. While that's still petty, it's believable and kind of sad. It shows that the teacher isn't just some cartoonish villain, but rather is a real person driven by real experiences.

Talking the Talk

Unless someone happens to be H.P. Lovecraft (and you're not), stories are going to have dialogue in them. This is where we get back to the argument about profanity, because if characters deliver dialogue that's bland, boring, or which doesn't fit with their background, education, time period, or world, then readers are going to call bullshit and toss the book sight-unseen over their shoulders.

Just a few examples of this done correctly.

When a character speaks he or she should be recognizable based on word choice, speech pattern and the general ear marks of slang and jargon. I discussed this on the Literary Mercenary's sister blog Improved Initiative right here. A cop who works Hell's Kitchen in New York that was raised in a struggling middle class home should speak differently than a Harvard-educated district attorney, and both of them should sound worlds different from a barbarian warlord from the frozen steppes, or from a space ace from the 52nd century. How do you accomplish that? With words.

Writers need to have an ear for language, and they should be able to research how it's changed over the years. As a quick for instance, no one in Ancient Persia would be called a warlock (here's why). Instead that person would be referred to as a sorcerer or sorceress (again, here's why). Characters who have been in the military will continue using slang they picked up in training, but that language will change based on what conflict someone was involved in and what time period that person served in. In as little as ten years words that are are commonly used like "keen" become the mark of a hopelessly outdated oldster instead of the hip, new way to talk. Lastly, how a person talks gives readers insight into that character. Often times something as simple as a verbal tic, an accent, or just using monosyllables will tell readers all they need to know without an elaborate back story explanation.

Also, don't write dialogue that tries to spell how an accent sounds. This can render entire swaths of page completely unreadable if someone is attempting to write a Scottish, French, or Spanish accent rather than describing the way the words sound in prose. If a reader has to work to translate it, they'll either skip it or stop reading entirely.

Don't Overlook the Little Things

Sometimes disbelief isn't broken by big problems; sometimes it's just that last straw. Accepting a setting where vampires and werewolves are fighting a shadow war in the concrete canyons of the modern day is relatively easy to do. Buying that a character can perform astonishing acrobatics in high heels that are also capable of absorbing a seven-story fall without snapping like twigs? That's a table-flip-we're-done-here offense for some readers.

But it looks cool?

The devil's in the details. If we're following a knight that never cares for his weapons or armor, why aren't they pitted and falling away to rust? If the leader of an entire nation is aware of an uprising of nightmare creatures in the countryside, why would he leave the fate of his people to a teenage wizard instead of calling in the army? If a character is an alien raised by human parents then how do they explain where he came from without a birth certificate, social security card, or any of the other paperwork modern governments worship?

It's the little things that eat away at your credibility. Never assume that something is too small to be noticed; if there's a chink in your story's armor, fix it. Readers need to believe that this world and this story could have happened the way you're telling it; that's the real magic of storytelling.


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